Spell Weaver [Book 2 Complete]

Alex was stirred from sleep by the quiet sounds of shuffling feet and whispered voices. He groaned and rolled over in his sleeping bag. Blinking, the world came into focus.

“Oh, he’s up,” Sam said.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The group was packing up their belongings, and most of them had guilty looks on their faces. “What are you guys doing up so early?”

They all shared a look before looking at him in confusion.

“What do you mean?” Mark asked. “Today’s the day!”

“What day?”

“Oh, come on,” Olivia said with a roll of her eyes.

Alex smiled. “Yeah, okay. Today’s the day. You guys just remind me of a bunch of kids on Christmas or something.”

“Sneaking around and waiting for the parents to get up? Huh… I could see it,” Mark said.

Alex pushed himself up from his bedroll and stretched. The soft moss that had begun to grow underneath it did a lot to ease the uncomfortable sleep they’d all experienced early on. The open cavern had slowly begun to fill with vibrant patches of green as Sam experimented and used his magic to grow more plants.

“We’ve all still got one more thing to do before we go back,” Alex said. He’d been giving it some thought over the last week and felt that the group needed some sort of major milestone to mark all the progress they’d made.

Mark groaned. “No, come on! We earned the break.”

“What is it?” Sam asked while Sarah and Olivia watched him skeptically.

“I’m going to set up a ward system before we go. Maelis has been putting off teaching me some things until I can make a working ward. I’ve also got to ask him for two more runes today, so if I can do this before we leave, I’ll be able to talk with him while we make our way back.”

“Okay, but what’s that got to do with us?” Olivia asked.

“Well, by System standards, I’ll be a Journeyman Warder. And even though I don’t have the class, I will technically have the skills of one. We’ve all gained a lot of levels and power in the four months we’ve been in the Rift. There are two more things that everyone can do to really stand apart from all of those other Hunters who’ve also been in here training.”

The group exchanged looks of confusion.

“Body tempering rituals,” he said plainly.

“Oh… shit,” Sam said.

Olivia flicked his ear in response to the curse word, but Sam only laughed as Valtherion echoed the sentence from where he lay nearby.

“I know you’ve all looked at the manual since we’ve been down here. You guys have put it off because of how rough my experience was, but I’m telling you, this is one of those things that will truly set us apart as a group. We can only do it once per rank, and even though the levels have started to slow down from our grinding, we need to do it before hitting C rank.”

“Can we just do it when we get to the town? I can hear the shower calling my name from here,” Sarah whined.

Alex shook his head in response but answered in a firm tone. “No. I don’t want anyone to know the kind of resources we have after Eura’s inheritance. We should do it now and go back into camp as strong as we can be.”

“What’s the other thing?” Mark asked.

“Spirit fruits. Eura left a ton of them in the inheritance, and I’ve been talking more with Maelis. They can just grant flat, raw stat boosts, and after eating two, the returns are severely diminished. So, now that you all have more stats, I think we should use the ‘natural treasures’ as Maelis calls them. I plan to use it to shore up one of my lower stats. What you choose is up to you.”

It took a bit more back and forth, but eventually everyone agreed. He instructed them to spread out around the cavern.

He went to Sam first. “Which fruit did you decide on, bud?”

From where Sam sat, his knee bounced to a quick tempo. “Uh, I think I want one for Mana and one for Wisdom.”

“All right, and what about the ritual?” he asked while pushing his mind toward the bracer. Over the last two weeks, he’d spent a decent amount of time organizing and categorizing things to keep track of exactly how many resources were available.

“I—I… think I want the one that will increase my core capacity.”

Alex nodded in response, seeing the logic behind their healer wanting a larger mana pool to work from. He handed over two fruits and instructed Sam to eat them while bending down and following the diagram in the advanced body tempering manual. The young healer slowly ate both fruits while Alex drew the ritual circle around him.

“I got five stat points in both stats,” he reported.

“Awesome, I was hoping it would be around there. Don’t be too nervous, you can do this. Ready?” Alex asked.

The healer nodded and gulped.

“You’ll do great. Just remember the reward’s on the other side and push through.” He set the last of the reagents in the nodes around the ritual and pulsed his mana through it. As he stood, he scanned Sam to see the progress that had been made over the last few months.